Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs: Fair trade or global trade war?

FA·2023·12·27 LETTER TO THE EDITOR Out of the Trenches November/December 2023 Published on December 13, 2023 A Ukrainian soldier standing on a tank in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, November 2023 A Ukrainian soldier standing on a tank in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, November 2023 Stringer / Reuters Sign in and save to read later Print this article Send by email Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Get a link Page url https://www.foreignaffairs.com/out-trenches Request Reprint Permissions In “Back in the Trenches” (September/October 2023), Stephen Biddle contends that the war in Ukraine more closely resembles World War I and World War II than a military revolution and does not reflect a revolutionary change in the character of warfare. To support his argument, he asserts that armies lost a greater percentage of tanks in those wars than the Russians and Ukrainians are losing today in Ukraine. Biddle points out that the United Kingdom lost 98 percent of its tanks in the 1918 Battle of Amiens. What he fails to mention, however, is that 80 percent of those losses were the result of mechanical failures, not damage inflicted during combat. In World War II, hundreds of divisions were engaged in mobile warfare. In contrast, the war in Ukraine now features small infantry-led fights in which tanks play a minimal support role. Even so, tank losses exceed 50 percent for both sides. Clearly, new technology is having an effect. In the entire Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that took place in the fall of 2020, over 75 percent of Armenian vehicle losses were caused by drones, according to the open-source organization Oryx. In Ukraine, hundreds of videos show vehicles being destroyed by drones. The fact that $400 drones are laying waste to armor from miles away represents a significant tactical shift. A core element of Biddle’s argument is that the number of casualties inflicted per round of artillery fired “exceeds the world war rates, but not by much.” Yet Biddle goes on to put the World War II figure at three casualties per 100 rounds fired and the figure for the Ukrainian army today at eight casualties per 100 rounds fired—a 266 percent increase. And the Ukrainians have achieved that gain even though they are firing mostly unguided rounds, some of which are decades old, from a set of global suppliers that have uneven quality-control standards. Something is making these systems much more effective. The answer is drones. As Biddle notes, they permit the army to observe and adjust its artillery missions. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Biddle contends that precision munitions have had little effect on the battlefield. But he neglects to mention the Ukrainians’ highly effective use of extensive surveillance, an agile command-and-control system, and long-range rocket launchers and missiles such as HIMARS and Storm Shadow. He also ignores the dozens of videos showing cheap Ukrainian drones targeting as few as two soldiers. Ukraine certainly believes that drones have had a huge impact. In May, it ordered 200,000 more of them for delivery by year’s end. Anyone looking at the German and Allied offensives of 1918 would have seen little that was new. Both were based on massed infantry and artillery. The German storm troopers’ task-organized infantry-arms teams that pierced through Allied trenches did not appear to foreshadow the breakthroughs in penetration and encirclement of World War II. Nor did the British tank brigades at Amiens foretell the mechanized formations that allowed the Germans to dominate land warfare from 1939 to 1940. Yet in hindsight, it is clear that the new tactics and equipment of armored forces dramatically changed ground warfare in World War II. Today, by combining satellite surveillance with drones, militaries can precisely target high-value assets deep behind enemy lines and launch mass attacks against even low-value targets such as individual fighting positions. Despite having a limited number of precision weapons, Ukraine has shown how powerful new technologies can be if they are integrated operationally. It does not take great imagination to envision the impact of tens of thousands of drones that orbit over a battlefield until they detect and attack a target. Between the world wars, visionaries developed innovative new concepts and behaviors, with Germany creating the blitzkrieg combined-arms attack and Japan perfecting aircraft carrier–based warfare. Allied leaders paid a huge price in blood and treasure when they failed to adapt. Success in future conflicts will require integrating new technologies into winning strategies. The first step is to reject the idea that nothing is changing. T. X. Hammes Distinguished Research Fellow, Center for Strategic Research, National Defense University BIDDLE REPLIES: Length constraints preclude a full debate, so I will focus on a couple of key points. As I argued in my article, artillery has become more lethal, but at a steady, continuous, roughly linear rate of around an additional 0.05 casualties per hundred rounds per year for over a century now, much of it driven by progressive changes in caliber and fuses. The data show no evidence that drones or improved precision have caused any sudden changes in casualty numbers. Nobody is arguing that nothing changes. The issues are the rate of change in the nature of warfare and the reasons for it. What the war in Ukraine shows is incremental change, because adaptation to new technologies limits their impact on the battlefield. Consider drones. Ukraine has enough drones today to “swarm” the Russians on key fronts if it wants to. But drones spur adaptation; for example, combatants can counter swarms of cheap drones by using omnidirectional jamming, which discourages swarming. On YouTube, viewers see the drone missions that succeed, not those that fail. But studies show that the latter now far outnumber the former. The Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, has estimated that only one mission in three succeeds; other sources put the figure at one in every seven to ten. These results do not mean that drones are useless, but they do not reflect transformational impact on warfare, which would explain the merely incremental changes in observed battlefield outcomes. It has now been over 30 years since transformation advocates began arguing that warfare is being revolutionized. Yet battle outcomes still differ only by degree from the past. Is this really the right way to think about military change? 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Dara Massicot 給編輯的一封信 走出戰壕 2023 年 11 月/12 月 發表於2023 年 12 月 13 日 2023 年 11 月，烏克蘭扎波羅熱地區，一名烏克蘭士兵站在坦克上 2023 年 11 月，烏克蘭扎波羅熱地區，一名烏克蘭士兵站在坦克上 斯金格/路透社 登入並儲存以供稍後閱讀 列印這篇文章 透過電子郵件發送 分享到Twitter 在臉書上分享 在領英上分享 獲取連結 頁面網址 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/out-trenches 請求轉載權限 在《重返戰壕》（2023 年9 月/10 月）中，史蒂芬‧比德爾認為，烏克蘭戰爭更像是第一次世界大戰和第二次世界大戰，而不是軍事革命，並且沒有反映出戰爭性質的革命性變化。為了支持他的論點，他斷言，軍隊在這些戰爭中損失的坦克比例比俄羅斯人和烏克蘭人今天在烏克蘭損失的坦克比例還要高。比德爾指出，英國在 1918 年的亞眠戰役中損失了 98% 的坦克。 然而，他沒有提及的是，其中 80% 的損失是機械故障造成的，而不是戰鬥中造成的損壞。二戰中，數百個師參與運動戰。相較之下，烏克蘭戰爭現在的特點是由步兵主導的小型戰鬥，其中坦克發揮的支援作用很小。即便如此，雙方的坦克損失都超過了 50%。顯然，新技術正在發揮作用。據開源組織 Oryx 稱，在 2020 年秋季發生的整個納戈爾諾-卡拉巴赫衝突中，超過 75% 的亞美尼亞車輛損失是由無人機造成的。在烏克蘭，數百段影片顯示車輛被無人機摧毀。價值 400 美元的無人機從數英里外摧毀裝甲，這一事實代表著重大的戰術轉變。 比德爾論點的一個核心要素是，每發砲火造成的傷亡人數「超過了世界大戰的傷亡人數，但幅度並不大」。然而比德爾繼續將二戰的數字定為每 100 發子彈造成 3 人傷亡，而如今烏克蘭軍隊的數字為每 100 發子彈造成 8 人傷亡——增加了 266%。烏克蘭人已經取得了這一成果，儘管他們發射的彈藥大多是非導引彈藥，其中一些彈藥已經有幾十年的歷史了，而且這些彈藥來自品質控制標準參差不齊的全球供應商。有些東西正在使這些系統變得更加有效。答案是無人機。正如比德爾所指出的，它們允許軍隊觀察和調整其砲兵任務。 隨時了解狀況。 每週提供深入分析。 比德爾認為，精確彈藥在戰場上的作用微乎其微。但他忽略了烏克蘭人對廣泛監視、敏捷指揮和控制系統以及遠程火箭發射器和飛彈（如HIMARS和風暴之影）的高效使用。他還忽略了數十個視頻，這些視頻顯示廉價的烏克蘭無人機僅瞄準兩名士兵。烏克蘭當然相信無人機已經產生了巨大的影響。5月份，該公司又訂購了20萬台，以便在年底前交貨。 任何看過 1918 年德國和盟軍攻勢的人都不會看到什麼新鮮事。兩者都以大規模步兵和砲兵為基礎。德國衝鋒隊特遣步兵分隊衝破盟軍戰壕，似乎並不預示著二戰滲透和包圍的突破。亞眠的英國坦克旅也沒有預見到機械化編隊使德國人能夠在 1939 年至 1940 年間主導地面戰爭 。但事後看來，裝甲部隊的新戰術和裝備顯然極大地改變了第二次世界大戰中的地面戰。 如今，透過將衛星監視與無人機結合，軍隊可以精確瞄準敵後深處的高價值資產，甚至可以對單一戰鬥陣地等低價值目標發動大規模攻擊。儘管精確武器數量有限，但烏克蘭已經展示瞭如果將新技術整合到作戰中可以發揮多麼強大的力量。不難想像數以萬計的無人機在戰場上空盤旋直到發現並攻擊目標所產生的影響。 在兩次世界大戰之間，有遠見的人開發了創新的新概念和行為，德國創造了閃電戰聯合武器攻擊，日本完善了航空母艦戰爭。當盟軍領導人未能適應時，他們付出了巨大的血和財富代價。未來衝突的成功需要將新技術融入致勝策略。第一步是拒絕「一切都沒有改變」的想法。 TX哈姆斯 國防大學戰略研究中心特聘研究員 比德爾回覆： 由於篇幅限制，無法進行全面的辯論，因此我將重點放在幾個關鍵點。 正如我在文章中指出的那樣，火砲已經變得更加致命，但一個多世紀以來，火砲的殺傷力一直在穩定、持續、大致線性地增加，每年每百發砲彈造成0.05 人左右的傷亡，其中大部分是由口徑和口徑的逐步變化推動的。保險絲。數據顯示，沒有證據表明無人機或精確度的提高導致了傷亡人數的突然變化。 沒有人認為一切都沒有改變。問題在於戰爭性質的變化速度及其原因。烏克蘭戰爭展示的是漸進式變化，因為對新技術的適應限制了它們對戰場的影響。 考慮無人機。烏克蘭如今擁有足夠的無人機，如果願意的話，可以在關鍵戰線上「蜂擁而至」俄羅斯。但無人機刺激了適應；例如，戰鬥人員可以透過使用全向幹擾來對抗成群的廉價無人機，從而阻止蜂擁而至。在 YouTube 上，觀眾看到的是成功的無人機任務，而不是失敗的無人機任務。但研究表明，後者的數量現在遠遠超過前者。英國智庫皇家聯合軍種研究所估計，只有三分之一的任務成功；其他消息來源稱這一數字為七到十分之一。這些結果並不意味著無人機毫無用處，但它們並沒有反映出對戰爭的變革性影響，這可以解釋觀察到的戰場結果的漸進變化。 自從變革倡議者開始主張戰爭正在發生革命以來，已經過了 30 多年。然而，戰鬥的結果仍然與過去只是程度不同。這真的是思考軍事變革的正確方式嗎？ 最常閱讀的文章 如何挫敗中國領導全球南方的努力 美國應該將印度視為通往世界其他地區的橋樑 快樂獸雅各布 處理巴以衝突，美國沒有輕鬆出路 拜登必須敢於冒險、直言不諱、大膽行動 亞倫大衛米勒和丹尼爾庫爾澤 2023 年精選 我們的編輯從印刷版和網路版中精選的內容 徘徊在邊緣 古巴飛彈危機的秘密歷史與未吸取的教訓 謝爾蓋·拉琴科和弗拉迪斯拉夫·祖博克 推薦文章 2023 年 7 月，烏克蘭諾沃達里夫卡一輛被摧毀的俄羅斯坦克 回到戰壕 為什麼新科技沒有徹底改變烏克蘭的戰爭 史蒂芬·比德爾 俄羅斯做錯了什麼 莫斯科能從烏克蘭的失敗中學到教訓嗎？ 達拉·馬西科特 The Rebirth of Russian Spycraft How the Ukraine War Has Changed the Game for the Kremlin’s Operatives—and Their Western Rivals By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan December 27, 2023 A partial solar eclipse and the Russian coat of arms in Moscow, October 2022 Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters In April 2023, a prominent Russian national with suspected ties to Russian intelligence pulled off an impressive escape from Italian authorities. Artem Uss, a Russian businessman and the son of a former Russian governor, had been detained in Milan a few months earlier on charges of smuggling sensitive U.S. military technology to Russia. According to an indictment issued by a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, in October 2022, Uss had illegally trafficked in the semiconductors needed to build ballistic missiles and a variety of other weapons, some of which were being used in the war in Ukraine. But while Uss was awaiting extradition to the United States, he was exfiltrated from Italy with the help of a Serbian criminal gang and returned to Russia. The escape, which was reported in The Wall Street Journal last spring, was only one of a series of recent incidents suggesting how much Russia’s intelligence forces have regrouped since the start of the war in Ukraine. Back in the spring of 2022, in the months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, the Russian intelligence agencies had seemed disoriented and confused. One by one, European countries had kicked out Russia’s diplomats; according to one British estimate, some 600 Russian officials were expelled from Europe, of which perhaps 400 were believed to be spies. The FSB, Russia’s internal security service, had also badly misjudged the kind of resistance that Russian forces would face in Ukraine, assuming that Russia could quickly take Kyiv. This contributed to Russia’s humiliating performance. Now, Russia’s foreign intelligence network appears to be back with a vengeance. And it is becoming more inventive, increasingly relying on foreign nationals—such as the Serbian gang that assisted Uss, for instance—to help it get around restrictions on Russians. Before the war, Western intelligence agencies mostly dealt with Russian operations being carried out by Russian nationals. That is no longer the case. Today, Russian intelligence activities draw on a range of foreign nationals, and that includes not only spying on the West and tracking arms shipments to Ukraine but also applying growing pressure on Russian exiles and opponents of the Putin regime who have fled abroad since the war started. Evidence of such activity is turning up everywhere from Georgia and Serbia to NATO countries such as Bulgaria and Poland. In early 2023, for example, British officials arrested five Bulgarians who were accused of spying for Russia, including in an effort to keep tabs on Russian exiles in London. At the same time, Russia’s spy agencies also appear to have shifted their orientation. Before the war, there was a division of labor among the three principal intelligence services—the SVR (foreign intelligence), the GRU (military intelligence), and the FSB (domestic security). In the past, it was generally understood that the SVR mostly focused on political and industrial espionage and the GRU on military issues, while the FSB was primarily focused on Russia itself, using its foreign branch mainly to conduct operations against Russians abroad and to keep friendly regimes in neighboring countries in power. Now, these distinctions are no longer so clear: all three agencies are deeply involved in the war in Ukraine, and all three have been actively recruiting new assets among Russia’s most recent exiles abroad. The return of Moscow’s spying apparatus has significant implications for the West in its efforts to counter Russian meddling and Russian intelligence operations. If recent indications are correct, Russian intelligence activities in Europe and elsewhere may pose a significantly greater threat than had been assumed in the early stages of the war. At the same time, these changes offer insight into Putin’s own wartime regime and the extent to which it is increasingly rebuilding Russia’s spy agencies according to earlier models from the Soviet decades. Putin is not only attempting to make up for the Soviet KGB’s failure in its confrontation with the West in the late twentieth century. He is also trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service, which had considerable success against the West in the decades from the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II. THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR Before Russia began its full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, the country’s intelligence services looked fairly weak. They had long suffered from interagency infighting and turf wars, as well as from a breakdown in trust between the generals and the rank and file, which led to significant delays and failures in getting information from the ground to the top level. Russian intelligence operations, meanwhile, increasingly became known chiefly for their sloppiness, as in the cases of the botched poisonings of the former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom in 2018 and the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020. In short, the Russian spy services seemed to have lost much of their former luster, a problem that burst into the open with the embarrassing misreading of Ukraine in the planning for Russia’s invasion. But as the war in Ukraine entered its second year, the Russian intelligence agencies regrouped and found a new sense of purpose. Instead of dwelling on their mistakes and questioning why they had so utterly failed to anticipate Ukrainian resistance in the initial invasion, the agencies moved on, taking new strength from the fact that they were withstanding a confrontation with the entire West. They have not only increased their activities in Europe and in neighboring countries; the FSB has also stepped up its efforts to fight back Ukrainian ops on Russian soil. That Putin didn’t make any radical changes in the security services despite the catastrophe of 2022 has been seen as a virtue: since the tumultuous 1990s, there has been a widely shared view both among the intelligence leadership and the rank and file that any attempt to overhaul the agencies will weaken their capabilities. Underlying this new activity, however, has also been a larger goal: revitalizing Russia’s overall intelligence war against the West. This is a war that for the main Russian agencies goes back to the earliest years of the Soviet era. As Russian intelligence officials see it, the war in Ukraine has launched the third round of a great spy war that has been playing out since 1917. Putin is trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service. The first round of this struggle, in which early Soviet operatives faced off primarily against their British counterparts, started soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. In that original conflict, Soviet agents successfully compromised any chance of fomenting resistance to the Bolshevik regime from abroad. They did this by conducting a massive and very successful false-flag operation, code-named Trust, in which they lured politically active Russian émigrés, as well as British spies, to the Soviet Union to help a fake anti-Bolshevik organization. These anti-Soviet activists were in this way identified and killed. The conflict reached its peak during World War II, when Russian spies successfully penetrated British intelligence and, in the United States, got access to the Manhattan Project and stole the secrets of the atomic bomb. Overall, Soviet officials believed they won this first round with the West. The second round of the intelligence war, however, didn’t end so well for Moscow. During the Cold War, the KGB failed to save the Soviet regime it swore to protect. Then, in the early 1990s, the agency was nearly destroyed after being split apart and dismembered. The collapse left lasting scars on Putin, who witnessed it firsthand, and his security elite, as they struggled to rebuild a Russian state that had lost its former power. (Putin ultimately built the FSB on the KGB’s former foundations.) Now, with the onset of a new grand conflict with the West, Russia’s intelligence agencies are seeking to reverse the setbacks that unfolded at the end of the Cold War. And they sense a new opportunity, seeing the war in Ukraine as the opening salvo in the third round of the intelligence war. The sense of continuity with their Soviet predecessors has even taken visible form in Russia: in September, Sergei Naryshkin, Russia’s head of foreign intelligence, inaugurated a new statue to the founder of the Soviet secret police in the courtyard of the SVR’s Moscow headquarters. And in November, the FSB reinforced that message by celebrating the 100th anniversary of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police, and stressing the role of the OGPU in crushing political émigré organizations. But the continuity goes well beyond celebrating early Soviet exploits. In the run-up to the war and since, Putin has made notable use of former KGB generals who share his eagerness to avenge the humiliation of the Soviet collapse. Nikolai Gribin, who in the 1980s served as deputy head of foreign disinformation operations at the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, has a lead role in a new Russian think tank launched in 2021, the National Research Institute for the Development of Communications, which seeks to shape pro-Kremlin opinion in countries near Russia, with a particular focus on Belarus. (Gribin himself has authored several research reports on public opinion in Belarus.) In the 1980s, Alexander Mikhailov served in the KGB’s infamous Fifth Directorate—the branch given the task of rooting out ideological subversion, including dissidents, musicians, and church leaders—and ran disinformation operations for the FSB in the 1990s. Since the fall of 2021, a few months before the invasion, Mikhailov has been the FSB’s unofficial mouthpiece for the Russian media, promoting the agency’s view of events in Ukraine. As Russian intelligence portrays it, the war pits the United States and Europe against Russia, with the Ukrainians serving merely as the puppets of their Western spymasters. Putin giving a speech near the FSB's headquarters in Moscow, June 2022 Aleksey Nikolskyi / Sputnik / Kremlin / Reuters Along with Putin, Russia’s spy agencies have also drawn some important lessons from the earlier Soviet intelligence wars. Because it pitted Russia directly against the West, the war in Ukraine has prompted the Kremlin and its spy agencies to rethink several major national security questions that hadn’t been closely studied since 1991. For example, there was the question of Russia’s borders and whether to close them. The Kremlin decided against doing so, and that has benefited the intelligence services, which can use the new exodus of Russian nationals to Europe and other neighboring countries to help make up for the expulsions of Russian diplomats from European capitals. Putin has clearly set out to avoid the mistakes made during the Cold War, when the Soviets significantly restrained the cross-border movement of people, hampering Soviet intelligence. But there was another pressing problem for the Kremlin: how to enforce discipline within the ranks. Putin could have followed Stalin’s approach, embarking on large-scale purges and mass repressions. But he seems to have learned that those measures ultimately backfired for the Soviets. Putin understands that instilling fear is a useful tool but that outright purges would hurt the agencies—as they did in the 1930s when the Soviets’ foreign intelligence lost its most talented agents. Thus, the head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, Sergei Beseda, was initially detained and held incommunicado after the first disastrous days of the Ukraine invasion. But after several weeks, he was reinstated, and the broader purges in military intelligence and the FSB that many expected after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary company, led a mutiny in June 2023 never materialized. Overall, Putin has taken a flexible, pragmatic approach to his intelligence services, playing between the ever-present fear of purges and encouraging the agencies to be more innovative at regaining ground in the West. One result seems to have been a noticeable rise in more ambitious foreign operations over the past year, including alleged sabotage operations, as well as the exfiltration of the Russian operative in Italy and stepped up recruitment efforts in several NATO countries, as is apparent in the case of a member of Germany’s BND intelligence agency who was arrested in December 2022 on charges of allegedly transferring highly-classified information to the Russian government, and is now on trial for treason. SPIES LIKE US In staging their comeback, Russia’s spy agencies have also internalized another important lesson from the Soviet years: the strategic use of ideology. In the 1930s, Moscow was able to win over many Westerners to the Soviet cause by aiming its arguments at Western deficiencies rather than promoting Marxist doctrine. At the time, Soviet agents learned that they didn’t really need to sell a full-fledged communist ideology; instead, they could portray the Soviet Union as an alternative to Western imperialism, emphasizing the West’s double standards and hypocrisy and offering in contrast a leader who stood up against global powers. These ideas are exactly what Russian agencies can now pedal to potential allies and recruits in Russia’s new intelligence war with the West. As Russia prepares to enter a third year of war, its intelligence agencies know that the Kremlin supports them and shares their paranoia and prejudices. This reality suggests that the spy services can count on the Kremlin’s protection. But it doesn’t mean that Putin himself is more secure in power. For much of the past 20 years, Putin has struggled with the challenge of how to control his vast security and intelligence community, spread over an enormous country and abroad. In the early 2000s, he destroyed former President Boris Yeltsin’s concept of competing spy services, making the FSB the top agency. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin tried to bring his intelligence forces to heel by sending several middle-rank officers to jail on corruption charges. But this did not result in tighter Kremlin control of the agencies. Now, with the war in Ukraine, Putin has tried to avoid the mistakes of the past and keep his intelligence forces loyal. He has also succeeded in making them stronger, for the time being, than at any previous point in the war. But it is unclear if any of this has improved his control over them. And so far, Putin has done nothing to fix the problem: he is unwilling to repeat Stalin’s mistakes of purging his agencies on an industrial scale, but he also understands that unlike during the Soviet years, when the Communist Party controlled the KGB, he has few other ways to rein them in. If things began to go badly for Russia in the war, this one-sided dynamic could mean that Putin’s spies might be in no rush to save him. ANDREI SOLDATOV is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities. IRINA BOROGAN is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Deputy Editor of Agentura.ru. They are the co-authors of The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin. MORE BY ANDREI SOLDATOV MORE BY IRINA BOROGAN More: Russian Federation Security Intelligence Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy Vladimir Putin War in Ukraine KGB Most-Read Articles How to Thwart China’s Bid to Lead the Global South America Should See India as a Bridge to the Rest of the World Happymon Jacob In Dealing With the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, America Has No Easy Way Out Biden Must Take Risks, Talk Straight, and Act Boldly Aaron David Miller and Daniel C. Kurtzer The Best of 2023 Our Editors’ Top Picks From Print and Web Blundering on the Brink The Secret History and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok Recommended Articles A Ukrainian tank near Bakhmut, Ukraine, December 2023 Europe’s Emerging War Fatigue How to Shore Up Falling Support for Ukraine Susi Dennison and Pawel Zerka Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, right, listening to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, September 2023 There Is a Path to Victory in Ukraine The Delusions and Dangers of Defeatist Voices in the West Dmytro Kuleba What War Games Really Reveal Outcomes Matter Less Than Who Pays and Who Plays By Jacquelyn Schneider December 26, 2023 A war game simulation on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., April 2023 A war game simulation on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., April 2023 Amanda Andrade Rhoades / Reuters Sign in and save to read later Print this article Send by email Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Get a link Page url https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/what-war-games-really-reveal Get Citation Request Reprint Permissions Last January, the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives created a special committee to examine the economic and military challenges China poses to the United States. Mike Gallagher, a Republican representative from Wisconsin who is one of Washington’s most vocal China hawks, was an obvious choice to lead the panel. For the past year, Gallagher has used the committee to sound the alarm on China and rally support for new measures that could hinder Beijing in its competition with the United States. In his quest to build political consensus around a tougher approach to China, Gallagher (and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Raja Krishnamoorthi) has employed one particularly effective tool: the war game. In April, Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi convened a bipartisan group of lawmakers to spend an evening playing a war game that simulated a conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan. In Gallagher’s opening remarks, he said he hoped that playing the game would impart “a sense of urgency” and demonstrate “that there are meaningful things we can do in this Congress through legislative action to improve the prospect of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” Players were asked to act as advisers to the president, recommending diplomatic, economic, and military responses to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. These members of Congress gathered around a campaign map, their foreign and domestic moves adjudicated by a war-gaming facilitator from a Washington think tank. Their goal was to deter China, represented by a team made up of think-tank staff members. According to Gallagher, the game revealed that the United States needed to “arm Taiwan to the teeth”—a strong endorsement for a multibillion-dollar package of Taiwanese military aid that his China committee was considering at the time. Since then, Gallagher has taken his war game on the road, playing a version with Wall Street executives in New York City in early September, and he says he plans to play a similar game with leaders of American technology companies. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. These congressional games came on the heels of a series of high-visibility unclassified Taiwan war games played in 2022 at prominent American think tanks. The outcome of these games made waves in American media, securing segments on the Sunday morning news shows and headlines in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The games drew broad attention partly because of who was playing them: among the participants were Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Defense and a possible future secretary of defense in a Democratic administration, and General James “Mike” Holmes, the retired four-star commander of Air Combat Command. Although run with different players and designs, these games demonstrated that there would be “no quick victory” for either side, that all military forces involved would suffer dramatic casualties, that the United States desperately needs more munitions, and that such a conflict would have a dangerous potential for escalation—even to nuclear war. Despite the attention devoted to these outcomes, the games did not reveal anything novel or surprising about China or weaknesses in the U.S. military arsenal. But they did reveal something about policymaking and influence-peddling in the United States, where advocates of various foreign and domestic policies have come to see war games as a useful tool in advancing their agendas. War games go beyond predicting futures; they are interactive and evocative experiences for players and compelling stories for domestic and foreign audiences. They can be used (knowingly and unknowingly) to influence choices about budgets, weapons, foreign policies, and, ultimately, international power. By designing and framing a war game carefully, planners can create an outcome of their choosing. Accordingly, a war game often reveals more about the interests and intentions of the players than it does about the outcome of the game itself. In the case of the Taiwan games that are so popular in Washington right now, their value is not in informing defense leaders that a war between the United States and China would be difficult to win. U.S. officials don’t need war games to tell them that. The games are more useful to officials—and to outside observers—for what they reveal about the factions and players in American politics pushing the country to start preparing for war with China. REHEARSING WAR It is important to understand what war games are. While the Chinese game of Go is often credited as the first “war game,” it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that war games became professional military tools. The military campaign game Kriegsspiel introduced maps, dice, and rule sets created by Prussian officers. The games were interactive and engaging, and—for the first time in war-gaming history—realistic enough to simulate military battles. As the Prussian field marshal Friedrich Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Müffling exclaimed in 1824 after being introduced to it, “This is no ordinary game—this is a school of war!” The games were used so extensively in Prussian campaign planning and military training that many argued that they were key to Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866. The combination of immersion and vividness captured the attention of Europe’s new industrial-age military leaders, who were keen to apply new scientific approaches to the large ground wars of the Napoleonic era. Kriegsspiel focused on ground wars. In the United States, however, the most influential war games focused on naval warfare. As early as the turn of the nineteenth century, the U.S. Navy employed war games as part of its budgeting and planning process, and it was the navy that professionalized military war games in the United States by making them a part of officer training. Similar to Kriegsspiel, which was modified by officers as they experimented with military campaign tactics, the navy war games between World War I and World War II modified rules, scenarios, and players to account for different tactics, technologies, and points of view—all while gaming a Pacific war against Japan. These interwar games shaped the naval tactics, logistics, and aircraft carrier deployments of the Pacific campaigns of World War II. After the war, Admiral Chester Nimitz told an audience at the U.S. Naval War College, “The war with Japan had been reenacted in the game room here by so many people in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war.” During the Cold War, U.S. war games evolved to incorporate the impact of nuclear weapons. This new generation of games, played by the economist Thomas Schelling and the political scientist Lincoln Bloomfield at MIT; Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Herman Kahn at RAND; and officers at the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon were largely free play, with limited rules or strict parameters. Unlike the navy’s interwar games, designed to train military officers, these games involved senior civilian officials placed in highly immersive scenarios meant to recreate the high-stakes decision-making of a nuclear crisis. In one instance, a group convened for three straight days at Camp David in Maryland to war-game a scenario that foreshadowed the Berlin crisis of 1961. Red and blue cells had four hours to make each move, their actions adjudicated in heated debate among top experts of the day. The experience was so absorbing that Schelling, one of the organizers, remembered that “these were games in which people got desperately involved. . . . Their pride, their self-esteem, and sometimes even their local reputations were very much wrapped up.” War games are not crystal balls. War games reached an important inflection point in the 1960s with a series of games code-named Sigma that were focused on Indochina. These games included highly detailed scenarios, limited rules built by and adjudicated by a staff of experts (some sources claim that each scenario involved more than 1,000 man-hours to create) and played by senior decision-makers from across the federal government. The games’ findings—that strategic bombing would fail to convince the North Vietnamese to surrender and that the United States would end up stalemated in a bloody conflict in Vietnam—were remarkably prescient. Despite the Sigma games’ success at predicting the outcome of the Vietnam War, senior government officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, distrusted the heavy emphasis placed on human decision-making. McNamara sought to decrease the subjectivity of games by replacing human play with computer simulations of warfare. The proponents of this “scientific” approach argued that computer-run war games could solve nuclear conflict by reducing human error caused by irrationality and emotion. Ultimately, the drive to automate war games created a backlash as scholars at RAND and other war-gaming centers criticized the attempt to trivialize the human decision-making part of war. In the years after McNamara’s departure, the Pentagon returned to games that evoked the large-scale, richly detailed scenarios of the earlier Sigma games. Worried about potential nuclear escalation with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Reagan administration called on Schelling to once again design immersive political-military games. Dubbed the Proud Prophet games, the series ran over seven weeks in 1983 and included 200 players. Perhaps paradoxically, the normalization of games within defense planning led to a kind of stagnation in game design as they began to mirror the bureaucratization of the national security state. When Robert Work became deputy defense secretary in 2014, he concluded that war games were not evolving or providing valuable information. He tried to lead a renaissance, investing in war-gaming initiatives throughout the Pentagon, including the creation of a large library of games. GAMING WASHINGTON The history of war games shows how game designers and conveners can influence outcomes through their choice of players, rules, and scenarios. This is why, even though war games are ostensibly designed to help people understand how a war might play out, the results of this “inner” game can reveal only so much. Instead, it is the outer game—who convened the game, who is playing it, how the game is played and distributed, and ultimately why it is played—that offers real insight. The essential puzzle piece to understanding the outer game is the decision to run the game in the first place. Games are costly. The most famous U.S. war games—such as the Sigma, Global War Game, or Proud Prophet series—required thousands of man-hours to prepare and took senior decision-makers away from their primary duties for extended periods. Games can require so much logistical support that even the top gaming facilities in the Department of Defense, such as the one at the Naval War College, can run only a few a year. Because of the resources involved, there is a behind-the-scenes bureaucratic and political fight to determine which games will be “sponsored” and prioritized. The act of gaming a particular region, weapon capability, or doctrine signals who is currently wielding the most power in the Department of Defense and what that person or group cares about. For example, a 2019 “Global Integrated War Game” seemed at first glance to be an innocuous and jargon-heavy future warfighting scenario. A closer look at the sponsoring institutions—the Joint Chiefs of Staff and functional commands such as Cyber Command, Strategic Command, and Special Operations Command—revealed how the games were being used to influence a power shift within the Department of Defense away from the combatant commands, which focus on specific geographic regions, toward “global integrators,” commands whose functions span the globe. Games played outside of government can also signal public sentiment and political will, providing adversaries with clues to the level of popular support for a particular scenario. If war games about a specific adversary are played widely in civilian society, this could be a sign that this society is considering the prospect of a future war. In Washington, games run by different think tanks can signal convergence around a policy problem. For example, today’s Taiwan games are being funded and run by think tanks that span ideologies and political parties. The selection of participants can also reveal intentions. Game conveners may choose players who they believe will help them get to a certain outcome and avoid players that might derail their purpose. Alternatively, conveners can choose players based on how these participants might influence policy after playing the game. In this case, players become part of an entrepreneurial policy initiative in which the highly evocative experience of the game compels players to adopt a policy position. For example, for the 20XX future military capability games played from 1995 to 2000, the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment carefully chose the players, selecting up-and-coming civilian and military leaders who the team believed might influence defense policy on military technology for decades. One of those was Work, the future U.S. deputy secretary of defense, who cited the influence of these games on his technology-centered Third Offset Strategy, which called for investments in autonomy, unmanned systems, and network technologies. U.S. Congressman Mike Gallagher at a war game in Washington, D.C., April 2023 Amanda Andrade Rhoades / Reuters Sometimes the mere act of attendance in a war game can lend credibility to the game’s outcomes. In his book Obama’s Wars, the journalist Bob Woodward describes a war game the Pentagon was running to help decide how many troops would be needed for the surge of U.S. forces into Afghanistan in 2009. According to Woodward, Douglas Lute, President Barack Obama’s special assistant and senior coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time, argued that the National Security Council, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department should boycott the game because he believed it was designed to find a certain outcome (namely, the number of troops the Pentagon believed should be sent to Afghanistan). As Woodward recounts, Lute told his colleagues: “We should not participate in this. First of all, we don’t need the war game. I can tell you what the answer’s going to be. So I’m not spending a day over there in the Pentagon drinking lousy coffee to get to the self-evident conclusion. . . . If State and DNI and NSC participate in this war game, we’re going to give it the legitimacy that it does not deserve.” Choices about scenario, assumptions about adversaries’ objectives and capabilities, rules about how participants can play and what capabilities they can use, and the way in which outcomes are assessed can significantly affect the outcome of a game. These variables often shed light on what the game’s conveners want to achieve from playing it. For example, in the early twentieth century, U.S. Army advocates of airpower called for the integration of the airplane into war games at the Army War College, hoping that this would help bolster their case. Facilitators restricted how aircraft could be used, however, effectively assuring that airpower played very little role in the outcome of the game. To the chagrin of airpower enthusiasts, those who opposed building out the army’s airpower capabilities had new evidence to stymie investment in aircraft when the game was over. Finally, how the outcome of a war game is shared or publicized reveals the intentions of the game’s conveners. This is especially true for games played within the Department of Defense, where games are usually classified and their distribution is highly restricted. Declassifying or leaking games suggests that organizations have incentives to publicize the results—as a deterrent threat or to send a bureaucratic signal. In 2020, for example, the Department of Defense disclosed at a news briefing that it had conducted a war game focused on Russian tactical nuclear weapons. The department revealed that the game was played at Strategic Command and included Mark Esper, then the secretary of defense, as a player. Much about the game was unusual: the use of tactical nuclear weapons, the participation of a sitting secretary of defense, and the almost unprecedented disclosure of highly classified strategic gaming. But the war game and its publicization came at an important moment in a bureaucratic fight. The Trump administration had supported the development of tactical nuclear weapons in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. With the Trump administration in its final months, advocates saw a closing window of opportunity to secure funding and support for the controversial weapons. This may be why the administration decided to declassify and advertise the war game, which concluded that the United States needed a tactical nuclear weapon option to deter the Russians from using one. THE DRUMS OF WAR The circumstances surrounding today’s U.S.-Chinese games—who plays them, what they focus on, how they are played, and how they are publicized—provide important clues about the future path of U.S. policy toward China. The games’ findings—that Taiwan will urgently need arms and supplies from the United States, that the United States needs more munitions, and that the fight could be long and bloody—reflect what U.S. defense officials have been saying for almost a decade. But now those conclusions are being generated by a bipartisan bloc in Congress, reflecting the emergence of a faction within U.S. domestic politics that is keen to increase military and economic aid to Taiwan. Two assumptions that undergird most of these games reveal how U.S. policy toward China is becoming more hawkish. The first is that the defense of Taiwan is a strategic interest for the United States. Players are asked not to debate whether the United States should aid Taiwan but instead how to do so. It is easy to imagine a different outcome if players were told to debate that basic objective. The second vital assumption is that China intends to invade Taiwan. “Last night’s exercise reaffirmed what we already know: Xi is running hypothetical invasion scenarios in his head every single day,” announced Ashley Hinson, a Republican representative from Iowa, after the congressional game in April. But the game, which provides no new information about Xi’s intentions, could not have reaffirmed anything of the sort: what is inside Xi’s mind is unknowable. A few years ago, it may have been more likely to hear about war games involving inadvertent conflicts with the Chinese in the East or South China Sea. Those games focused on crisis de-escalation and deterrence and generally led to calls for the kind of power projection the United States has been comfortable conducting in the region over the last two decades: carrier group transits, combat patrols of U.S. fighter and intelligence aircraft, and exercises with allies and partners. The new war games, however, imagine a deliberate invasion of or attack on Taiwan by an overtly aggressive China. For the players representing the United States in these newer games, the goal is not just to de-escalate a simmering crisis but rather to defend the island—a mission that calls for a different set of policies than games designed to mitigate the danger of an attack rather than defeat it. U.S. Marines at a military camp in the Philippines, April 2019 Eloisa Lopez / Reuters It is worth considering what Beijing might conclude from watching the public discussion of these war games. For starters, the games likely reduce the uncertainty of Washington’s stated position of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to the question of whether the United States would use force to defend Taiwan: it’s hard to imagine anything less ambiguous than a loud, public, and bipartisan discussion of the pros and cons of various options for how the U.S. military could help protect the island. The games might also signal to Beijing that anti-Chinese factions are gaining power and influence inside the U.S. political system, with a consolidation of support among power brokers in favor of military industrialization, restrictive trade, and increased arms sales to Taiwan. China might also look at these war games and conclude the United States is on an unalterable course toward war. That would be a mistake: the games all fall short of calling for American forces to be stationed in Taiwan or for the United States to unambiguously, preemptively declare a military alliance with its government. They also do not anticipate or call for a U.S. military campaign against mainland China. These are important omissions from the games, although Chinese policymakers may interpret these omissions to be strategic rather than indicative of genuine restraint on Washington’s part. DON’T GET PLAYED War games are not crystal balls, but they are powerful tools of influence. Domestically, war games can rally constituencies in Congress, the armed services, opposing political parties, or the public. Internationally, games can signal a country’s intentions and help bolster the credibility of steps it has taken to deter conflict. War games reveal what states care about, what domestic political actors want, and how states believe wars will occur and play out. The immersive quality of such games and the way they bring people together for a shared experience make them uniquely effective forms of persuasion. As Bloomfield, the political scientist and statesman, wrote of the games run by MIT during the Cold War, reentering the real world after a game was “like coming out of a deep sleep after a particularly vivid dream. It takes time for the carryover of emotional content from the game to reality to wear off.” The richness of that experience is what makes war games so engaging and what helps them illuminate otherwise unpredictable situations. But they can be biased toward a specific conclusion and in this way become dangerous tools of propaganda to make a case for war. Done wrong, they can also turn the horrific reality of war into an abstraction, which could make a conflict seem less deadly. That is the effect that the sociologist Irving Horowitz had in mind in 1963 when he criticized Cold War–era thinkers such as Kahn, Schelling, Wohlstetter and Henry Kissinger as inhabitants of “a world of nightmarish intellectual ‘play.’” On the other hand, as Gallagher has pointed out, war games can also demonstrate the cost and seriousness of war, leading states to carefully build deterrence and defensive capabilities. Games about why wars start, not just who wins, can reveal patterns of inadvertent escalation and suggest mechanisms or strategies that opposing countries can take to avoid war in the first place. Furthermore, games can play an important diplomatic role in building trust between both allies and adversaries. War games can be biased toward a specific conclusion. It would be harder for organizers to manipulate war games if the press and the public better understood them. That means asking the right questions about the games’ outcomes, including how the players arrived at those outcomes. Who is paying for and convening the game? What are their motivations for running the game? Who is playing the game? What assumptions and rules are embedded in the game? Are details of the game being leaked, publicized, or disseminated in a way that could benefit the sponsors? Asking and answering such questions does not nullify the utility of a game’s findings; instead, it provides necessary context for interpreting them. The true value of war-gaming is its ability to immerse policymakers in a scenario that might be otherwise unthinkable and in which they might learn something about themselves. This is why war games do not predict the future but can shape it. Today’s war games do not foresee a future war between the United States and China. But the fact that they are being played at all should be viewed as a warning about where things are headed. You are reading a free article. Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access. Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives Unlock access to iOS/Android apps to save editions for offline reading Six issues a year in print, online, and audio editions JACQUELYN SCHNEIDER is a Hoover Fellow and Director of the Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. 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READ THE REVIEW WESTERN HEMISPHERE The Rebel Scribe: Carleton Beals and the Progressive Challenge to U.S. Policy in Latin America by Christopher Neal Neal’s highly entertaining biography of the writer Carleton Beals, whose work on Latin America foreshadowed later anti-imperialist critiques, sheds light on the United States’ relationship with the ruling elites of Latin America throughout the twentieth century. READ THE REVIEW Cooperating With the Colossus: A Social and Political History of U.S. Military Bases in World War II Latin America by Rebecca Herman In this splendid, well-balanced history of an extraordinary but seldom studied period in inter-American relations, Herman argues that pragmatic accords between the United States and Latin American countries enabled a brilliant if brief chapter of solidarity in the Western Hemisphere throughout World War II. READ THE REVIEW Solito: A Memoir by Javier Zamora Zamora’s deeply moving, highly personal memoir details his arduous and heroic trek, at age nine, from El Salvador through Guatemala and Mexico to Arizona in 1999, graphically describing the many daunting obstacles migrants must overcome to reach the United States. READ THE REVIEW EASTERN EUROPE AND FORMER SOVIET REPUBLICS On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border by Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey Based on their firsthand field research, anthropologists Billé and Humphrey present an enthralling portrayal of the 2,600-mile border between China and Russia as the line dividing two essentially different civilizations. READ THE REVIEW German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad by Nicole Eaton Eaton’s extremely rich historical account sheds light on the Kremlin’s decision in late 1947 to expel the German population of Königsberg, the region that would become the Soviet territory (and now Russian exclave) of Kaliningrad. READ THE REVIEW Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia by Adrienne Edgar Edgar’s absorbing historical study examines the consequences of a Soviet social engineering project that encouraged intermarriage between ethnic groups with the aim of building a Soviet nation, one free of ethnic or racial biases. Instead, Edgar notes, this campaign contributed to the rise of racialized notions of nationality. READ THE REVIEW MIDDLE EAST A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures by Shahzad Bashir In this dazzlingly creative and thought-provoking digital book, Bashir argues that Islam needs to be understood not as a monolithic, unchanging faith but as an accumulation of beliefs and practices that people have labeled “Islam” over time and across regions. READ THE REVIEW Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation, and Social Media by Marc Owen Jones Jones’s astonishing study details the use of social media and communication technology by governments, notably Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as tools of tyranny and propaganda. This deception pollutes public discourse across the Middle East and, more important, inhibits the critical thinking of the citizenry. READ THE REVIEW Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism by Steffen Hertog Hertog’s brisk, clear, and devastating portrayal of the consequences of decades of misguided economic policy in the Arab world traces the development of two-tiered economies throughout the region. READ THE REVIEW ASIA AND PACIFIC Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China by Martin K. Dimitrov Dimitrov brings to light the lesser-known techniques of mass surveillance in Leninist party-states, showing how such governments obsessively collected information on dissenters, not just to target them but to preempt protest by granting economic concessions in restive areas. READ THE REVIEW How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding by Nile Green In this fascinating and original study, Green explores sources in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and other languages to see how Bahai, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Zoroastrian travelers, merchants, and polemicists tried to understand and influence the societies and cultures of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. READ THE REVIEW The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline by Yasheng Huang In this wide-ranging and shrewd analysis of the Chinese state, Huang predicts that the crackdown on freedom under Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s modernized version of imperial rule may bring an end to the country’s brief spurt of dynamism. READ THE REVIEW AFRICA The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland by Noah L. Nathan Nathan makes the counterintuitive claim that a limited state can still have a large impact on local populations, focusing on the hinterland of northern Ghana to show how the thinness of the state in a region can still powerfully shape social inequality and local power relations. READ THE REVIEW History of South Africa: From 1902 to the Present by Thula Simpson Armed with fascinating details and anecdotes, Simpson finely traces the political history of South Africa since the beginning of the twentieth century, concluding that the historical legacies of apartheid, violence, and fractious governance continue to cast a heavy shadow over the country today. READ THE REVIEW The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid Reid brilliantly and ably tells the account of the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first elected prime minister, in what was one of the emblematic episodes of both the Cold War and the end of colonialism in Africa. READ THE REVIEW